In a cel animation workplace, non-photorealistic rendering techniques are often applied to a 3D scene model, which is constructed by referring to the 2D hand-drawn images of the scene. There exist a lot of scene features that must be modeled from the 2D information. The accentuation effects are amongst the most important features in a hand-drawn scene. In this context, accentuation refers to adding hand-drawn shading of the scene. The specific region that an artist wishes the viewer to observe is drawn brighter than the other regions.

In this paper, a method is proposed for the extraction of the accentuation effects from a single 2D painted image of an animated scene. This method enables the automatic addition of the accentuation effects to each frame of the animation, observed from other viewpoints.